Category: Startups

I’ve been doing some updates to the good ol’ blog, and noticed a fun post from 2.5 years ago highlighting my picks at the time.

RelateIQ — I ended up investing in their Series C as a result of this post (their founder Steve Loughlin invested in Mattermark, and after 2 years at Salesforce he is now a partner at Accel Partners), and they were acquired by Salesforce 5 months later for $390 million.

Instacart — They were my Y Combinator batch-mates, and I still use them for all my grocery shopping. This pick seems super obvious now, but at the time they had only raised their Series A when I picked them.

Uber — I picked them because they were an early Twilio customer and I was already spending way too much on the service. This one was probably already obvious, but they had only raised $300M of funding at this point (versus > $15 BILLION now) so my fantasy portfolio definitely benefits!

Hired — I picked them because I love the founders, and my company has been a customer from the beginning and the service just gets better and better. They announced their $15M Series A just 6 weeks after this pick.

Digital Ocean — I originally picked them in June 2013 because I knew their bootstrap story and how loved they are in the developer community. They would announce their Series A shortly after my February 2014 post as well.

Product Hunt — I picked them because they reminded me of Referly and Launchgram, and Ryan Hoover has the X factor. They didn’t have any funding when I made this pick, and would announce their Seed round later that year.

Magisto — I picked them because I had recently paid for their mobile app, which I very rarely do. The company hasn’t announced more funding since then but remain among the top 10 grossing apps in the photo and video category in iTunes.

Funding Summary

Collectively, the companies in this list have raised $15.2 Billion in funding since this call… but obviously this is totally skewed by Uber. Excluding Uber, the other companies went from $65 million of collective funding to $609 million, and only 1 of them did not raise a follow-on round.

This is of course a fantasy fund, and if I were really trying to get results things like winning the deal would have to be factored in. But it’s still fun to see how these things play out… and important to remember these were not nearly so obvious (at least to me, maybe VCs disagree) at the time.

It was fun making this list, and exciting to follow along as these companies have grown and evolved over the past 2+ years. I can’t wait to see what they each do next! I love angel investing, and happily these days I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, cat photos and rants from angry aunts appear in the same feeds as shared recipes and world news. Sulia is changing that by introducing subject-based “channels” where users can consume media about a single topic like technology, politics, or food. Moving away from a single crowded feed towards multiple focused feeds has the potential to be helpful to readers, publishers, and advertisers alike.

Pronounced “soo-lee-uh,” the company aggregates news in a style similar to Prismatic, but Sulia has significantly more traffic. Sulia reported a user base of 10 million users when it announced a $1.5M Series A in September of 2012 and has since, by our measures, more than doubled their traffic. Sulia’s VP of Editorial & Expert Operations, Josh Young tells me they’re on track to hit 15-20 million uniques by the end of the year.

Young emphasized that Sulia’s burgeoning traffic is now driving significant traffic to publishers – 100k monthly uniques to TMZ, 60k to Huffington Post, and 50k to ESPN to name a few. With distribution power like that, publishers would be wise to turn their attention towards getting their content on Sulia.

Sulia’s experience is comprised of individual subject-based channels, is mostly easy to use aside from an odd absence of headlines. Each channel is an endless scroll of relevant stories from publishers, like those mentioned above, and subject-area experts like Robert Scoble & Kara Swisher in Tech & Science, and Nate Silver & Anderson Cooper in Politics. In our interview this morning, Josh explained their “proprietary expertise index”:

“We index Twitters lists and sort them into subject areas. Then we think of membership in those lists as a “vote” for being interesting or having expertise in that area. For example, someone who is in 4,000 lists has more expertise than someone in 300 lists. This is how we know who the top people in each field are. From there we connect these social profiles with open RSS feeds. We filter the first sentence or so of those feeds to make sure they’re relevant.”

Aside from Twitter lists, users can influence the content displayed in each channel by clicking the “trust” button on each expert or publisher for given interest channels. The more “trust” experts & publishers accumulate, the more likely the content their is to appear. Through this, Young says Sulia is building the first “trust graph,” their key to breaking through the noise on today’s crowded web. The methodology seems sound, if not at least difficult to “game.”

Building the Business

15-20 million annual uniques and interest-segmented audiences isn’t just good for publishers though, it’s also good for advertisers. In an interview with Business Insider in November Jonathan Glick, Sulia’s CEO, explicitly stated that the motivation behind organizing content by subjects is to segment audiences for marketers & advertisers. In his words,

“One of the things that’s difficult about organizing content in the way that Twitter, and Tumblr, and Facebook do it today, which is all intermingled without a subject, is that a marketing message thrown into the middle of that feels a little bit like spam…whereas if you’re in the cooking section [of Sulia]…an ad for a new kind of canned soup makes a lot of sense.”

Driving hundreds of thousands of hits to publishers and itself seeing unique visitors in the tens of millions with no plateau in sight, Sulia is on track to become a major player in business of online publishing, and potentially a model for advertising as well. In our interview, Young said their focus in the coming months will be refining and improving their core IP, the “trust graph” in the interest of building a more useful tool for readers, publishers, and advertisers alike.